Atheism in history--developmental factors

Tiassa · Jul 17, 2002

Notes on atheism in history

I've been pulling together some information on what has become something of an infamous notion in this forum: the greater sense of God.

That is for another day. Pages of notes have to be sorted through and put in order.

However, I did come across the following while leafing through Armstrong's A History of God°

Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century, many people in Europe felt that religion had been gravely discredited. They were disgusted by the killing of Catholics by Protestants and Protestants by Catholics. Hundreds of people had died as marters for holding views that it was impossible to prove one way or another. Sects preaching a bewildering variety of doctrines that were deemed essential for salvation had proliferated alarmingly. There was now too much theological choice: many felt paralyzed and distressed by the variety of religions interpretations on offer. It was, therefore, significant that at this point in the history of the Western God, people started spotting "atheists", who seemed to be as numerous as the "witches," the old enemies of God and allies of the devil. It was said that these "atheists" had denied the existence of God, were acquiring converts to their sect and undermining the favric of society. Yet in fact, full-blown atheism in the sense that we use the word today was impossible. As Lucien Febvre has shown in his classic book The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, the conceptual difficulties in the way of a complete denial of God's existence at this time were so great as to be insurmountable. From birth and baptism to death and burial in the churchyard, religion dominated the life of every single man and woman. Every activity of the day, which was punctuated with church bells summoning the faithful to prayer, was saturated with religious beliefs and institutions: they dominated professional and public life--even the guilds and universities were religious organizations. As Febvre points out, God and religion were so ubiquitous that nobody at this stage thought to say, "So our life, the whole of our life, is dominated by CChristianity! How tiny is the area of our lives that is already secularized, compared to everytyhing that is still governed, regulated, and shaped by religion!" Even if an exceptional man could have achieved the objectivity necessary to question the nature of religion and the existence of God, he would have found no support in either the philosophy or the science of his time. Until there had formed a body of coherent reasons, each of which was based on another cluster of scientific verifications, nobody could deny the existence of a God whose religion shaped and dominated the moral, emotional, aesthetic and political life of Europe. Without this support, such a denial could only be a personal whim or a passing impulse that was unworthy of serious consideration. As Febvre has shown, a vernacular language such as French lacked either the voc abulary or syntax for skepticism. Such words as "absolute," "relative," "causality," "concept," and "intuition" were not yet in use. We should also remember that as yet no society in the world had eliminated religion, which was taken for granted as a fact of life. Not until the very end of the eighteenth century would a few Europeans find it possible to deny the existence of God.

What, then, did people mean when they accused one another of "atheism"? The French scientist Martin Mersenne (1588-1648), who was also a member of a strict Franciscan order, declared that there were about 50,000 atheists in Paris alone, but most of these "atheists" he named believed in God. Thus Pierre Carrin, the friend of Michel Montaigne, had defended Catholicism in his treatise Les Trois Vérités (1589), but in his chief work, De La Sagesse, he had stressed the frailty of reason and claimed that man could only reach God through faith. Mersenne disapproved of this and saw it as tantamount to "atheism". Another of the "unbelievers" he denounced was the Italian rationalist Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), even though Bruno believed in a sort of Stoic God who was the soul, origin and end of the universe. Mersenne called both these men "atheists" because he disagreed with them about God, not because they denied the existence of a Supreme Being. In rather the same way, pagans of the Roman emmpire had called Jews and Christians "atheists" because their opinion of the divine had differed from their own. During the sixteenth and seventheenth centuries, the word "atheist" was still reserved exclusively for polemic. Indeed, it was possible to call any of your enemies an "atheist" in thes ame way as people were dubbed "anarchists" or "communists" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

After the Reformation, people had become anxious about Christianity in a new way. Like "the witch" (or, indeed, "the anarchist" or "the communist"), "the atheist" was a projection of a buried anxiety. It reflected a hidden worry about the faith and could be used as a shock tactic to frighten the godly and encourage them in virtue. In the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker (1554-1600) claimed that there were two kinds of atheists: a tiny group who did not believe in God and a much larger number who lived as though God did not exist. People tended to lose sight of this distinction and concentrated on the latter, practical type of atheism. Thus in The Theatre of God's Judgments (1597), Thomas Beard's imaginary "atheist" denied the providence of God, the immortality of the soul and the afterlife but not, apparently, the existence of God. In his tract Atheism Closed and Open Anatomized (1634), John Wingfield claimed: "they hypocrite is an Atheist, the loose wicked man is an open Atheist; the secure, bold and proud transgressor is an Atheist: he that will not be taught or reformed is an Atheist." For the Welsh poet William Vaughan (1577-1641), who helped in the colonization of Newfoundland, those who raised rents or enclosed commons were obvious atheists. The english dramatist Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) proclaimed that the ambitious, the greedy, the gluttons, the vainglorious and prostitutes were all atheists.

The term "atheist was an insult. Nobody would have dreamed of calling himself an atheist. It was not yet a badge to be worn with pride. Yet during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people in the West would cultivate an attitude that would make the denial of God's existence not only possible but desirable. They would find support for their views in science. Yet the God of the Reformers could be seen to favor the new science. Because they believed in the absolute sovereignty of God, Luther and Calvin had both rejected Aristotle's view of nature as having intrinsic powers of its own. They believed that nature was as passive as the Christian, who could only accept the gift of salvation from God and could do nothing for himself. Calvin had explicitly condemned the scientific study of the natural world in which the invisible God had made himself known. There could be no conflict between science and scripture: God had adapted himself to our human limitations in the Bible, just as a skillful speaker adjusts his thought and speech to the capacity of his audience. The account of Creation, Calvin believed, was an example of balbutive (baby talk), which accommodated complex and mysterious processes to the mentality of simple people so that everybody could have faith in God. It was not to be taken literally. (287-289)
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These few pages hardly present a comprehensive history of the atheist idea, but hopefully can serve as a basis for possible exploration of a more comprehensive history of atheism.

In Europe a few people were beginning the trend away from God himself. In 1729 Jean Meslier, a country priest who had led an exemplary life, died an atheist. He left behind a memoir which was circulated by Voltaire. This expressed his disgust with humanity and his inability to believe in God. Newton's infinite space, Meslier believed, was the only eternal reality. Nothing but matter existed. Religion was a device used by the rich to oppress the ppoor and render them powerless. Christianity was distinguished by its particularly ludicrous doctrines, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation. His denial of God was meat too strong for even the philosophes. Voltaire removed the specifically atheistic passages and transformed the abbé into a Deist. By the end of the century, however, there were a few philosophers who were proud to call themselves atheists, thoug they remained a tiny minority. This was an entirely new development. Hitherto, "atheist" had been a term of abuse, a particularly nasty slur to hurl at your enemies. Now it was just beginning to be worn as a badge of pride. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) had taken the new empiricism to its logical conclusion. There was no need to go beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no philosophical reason for believing anything that lay beyond our sense experience. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume disposed of the argument that purported to prove God's existence from the design of the universe, arguing that it rested on analogical arguments that were inconclusive. One might be able to argue that the order we discern in the natural world pointed to an intelligent Overseer, but how, then, to account for this evil and the manifest disorder? There was no logical answer to this, and Hume, who had written the Dialogues in 1750, wisely left them unpublished. Some twelve months earlier, the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784) had been imprisoned for asking the same question in A Letter to the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, which introduced full-blown atheism to the general public.

Diderot himself denied that he was an atheist. He simply said that he did not care whether God existed or not. When Voltaire objected to his book, he replied: "I believe in God, although I live very well with the atheists .... It is ... very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe in God is not important at all." With unerring accuracy, Diderot had put his finger on the essential point. Once "God" has ceased to be a passionately subjective experience, "he" does not exist. As Diderot pointed out in the same letter, it was pointless to believe in the God of the philosophers who never interferes with the affairs of the world. The Hidden God had become Deus Otiosus: "Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths." He had come to the opposite conclusion to Pascal, who had seen the wager as of supreme importance and utterly impossible to ignore. In his Pensées Philosophiques, published in 1746, Diderot had dismissed Pascal's religious experience as too subjective: he and the Jesuits had both been passionately concerned with God but had very different ideas about him. How to choose between them? Such a "God" was nothing but a tempérament. At this point, three years before the publication of A Letter to the Blind, Diderot did believe that science--and science alone--could refute atheism. He evolved an impressive new interpretation of the argument from design. Instead of examining the vast motion of the universe, he urged people to examine the underlying structure of nature. The organization of a seed, a butterfly or an insect was too intricate to have happened by accident. IN the Pensées Diderot still believed that reason could prove the existence of God. Newton had got rid of all the superstition and foolishness of religion: a God who worked miracles was on par with the goblins with which we frighten our children.

Three years later, however, Diderot had come to question Newton and was no longer convinced that the external world provided any evidence for God. He saw clearly that God had nothing whatever to do with the new science. But he could only express this revolutionary and inflammatory thought in fictional terms. In A Letter to the Blind, Diderot imagined an argument between a Newtonian, whom he called "Mr. Holmes", and Nicholaus Saunderson (1682-1739), the late Cambridge mathematician who had lost his sight as a baby. Diderot makes Saunderson ask Holmes how the argument from design could be reconciled with such "monsters" and accidents as himself, who demonstrated anything but intelligent and benevolent planning:

What is this world, Mr. Holmes, but a complex, subject to cycles of change, all of which show a continual tendency to destruction: a rapid succession of beings that appear one by one, flourish and disappear; a merely transitory symmetry and a momentary appearance of order.

The God of Newton, and indeed of many conventional Christians, who was supposed to be literally responsible for everything that happens, was not only an absurdity but a horrible idea. To introduce "God" to explain things that we cannot explain at present was a failure of humility. "My good friend, Mr. Holmes," Diderot's Saunderson concludes, "admit your ignorance."

In Diderot's view there was no need of a Creator. Matter was no thte passive, ignoble stuff that Newton and the Protestants imagined, but had its own dynamic which obeys its own laws. It is this law of matter--not a Divine Mechanick--which is responsible for the apparent design we think we see. Nothing but matter existed. Diderot had taken Spinoza one step further. Instead of saying that there was no God but nature, Diderot had claimed that there was only nature and no God at all. He was not alone in his belief: scientists such as Abraham Trambley and John Turbeville Needham had discovered the principle of generative matter, which was now surfacing as an hypothesis in biology, microscopy, zoology, natural history and geology. Few were prepared to make a final break with God, however. Even the philosophers who frequented the salon of Paul Heinrich, Baron of Holbach (1723-89), did not publicly espouse atheism, though they enjoyed open and frank discussion. From these debates came Holbach's book The System of Nature: or Laws of the Moral and Physical World (1770), which became the bible of atheistic materialism. There was no supernatural alternative to nature, which, Holbach argued, was "but an immense chain of causes and effects which unceasingly flow from one another". To believe in God was dishonest and a denial of our true experience. It was also an act of despair. Religion created gods because people could not find any other explanation to console them for the tragedy of life in this world. They turned to the imaginary comforts of religion and philosophy in an attempt to establish some illusory sense of control, trying to propitiate an "agency" they imagine lurking behind the scenes to ward off terror and disaster. Aristotle had been wrong: philosophy was not the result of a noble desire for knowledge but the craven longing to avoid pain. The cradle of religion, therefore, was ignorance and fear, and a mature, enlightened man must climb out of it.

Holbach attempted his own history of God. First men had worshipped the forces of nature. this primitive animism had been acceptable because it had not tried to get beyond this world. The rot had set in when people had started to personify the sun, wind and sea to create gods in their own image and likeness. Finally they had merged all these godlings into one big Deity, which was nothing but a projection and a mass of contradicitons. Poets and theologians had done nothing over the centuries but

make a gigantic, exaggerated man, whom they will render illusory by dint of heaping together incompatible qualities. Human beings will never see in God, but a being of the human species, in whom they will strive to aggrandize the proportions, until they have formed a being totally inconceivable.

History shows that it is impossible to reconcile the so-called goodness of God with his omnipotence. Because it lacks coherence, the idea of God is bound to disintegrate. the philosophers and scientists have done their best to save it but they ahve fared no better than the poets and theologians. The "hautes perfections" that Descartes claimed to have proved were simply the product of his imagination. Even the great Newton was "a slave to the prejudices of his infancy". He had discovered absolute space and created a God out of the void who was simply "un homme puisssant", a divine despot terrorizing his human creators and reducing them to the condition of slaves.

Fortunately the Enlightenment would enable humanity to rid itself of this infantilism. Science would replace religion. "If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them." There are no higher truths or underlying patterns, no grand design. There is only nature itself;

Nature is not a work; she has always been self-existent; it is in her bosom that everything is operated; she is an immense laboratory provided with the materials, and who makes the instruments of which she avails herself to act. All her wroks are the effects of her own energy, and of those agents or couses which she makes, which she contains, which she puts in action.

God was not merely unnecessary, but positively harmful. By the end of the century, Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) had ejected God from physics. The planetary system had become a luminosity extending from the sun, which was gradually cooling. When Napoleon asked him: "Who was the author of this?" Laplace simply replied: "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là."

For centuries the monotheists in each of the God-religions had insisted that God was not merely another being. He did not exist like other phenomena we experience. In the West, however, Christian theologians had got into the habit of talking about God as though he really were one of the things that existed. They had seized upon the new science to prove the objective reality of God as though he could be tested and analyzed like anything else. Diderot, Holbach and Laplace had turned this attempt on its head and come to the same conclusion as the more extreme mystics: there was nothing out there. It was not long before other scientists and philosophers triumphantly declared that God was dead. (Armstrong, 341-345)
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Of course, this is just taken from one source which is at least secondary if not tertiary. Nonetheless, I find Armstrong generally fair; one can conclude that if a former Catholic nun teaching at a Rabbinical college who is also a member of the Association of Muslim Social Sciences and writes a book on Buddhism ... well, okay, I'll leave the conclusions for others. We can argue miniscule points, I suppose, but I'm more hoping to examine the development of the atheistic idea.

In the meantime, I'll just leave it at that for the time being.

° Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity & Islam. New York: Knopf, 1994.

thanx,
Tiassa
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Edit/Hint: Each of the bands in the poll has included in their catalog songs which make reference to God. From there, I'm not particularly picky about what the poll question actually is.

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Atheism in history--developmental factors

A useless poll:

Stryper

DC Talk

Michael W Smith

Nine Inch Nails

Marilyn Manson

Fates' Warning

Mercyful Fate

Savatage

Floater

Queens of the Stone Age

Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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Atheism in history--developmental factors

A useless poll:

Stryper

DC Talk

Michael W Smith

Nine Inch Nails

Marilyn Manson

Fates' Warning

Mercyful Fate

Savatage

Floater

Queens of the Stone Age

Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

Share This Page

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